As we wrote last week, the football program is adding to its facilities portfolio with a full 120-yard field indoor football building, and the hope is for ground to be broken in early spring, but there may not be any sort of major public announcement for a little while.

Rendering of the Bernheimer Architecture design blueprints

There’s a multitude of meetings taking place both internally at the university and with other appropriate external entities in the city, or as one athletic department staff member (preferring anonymity) recently described to The Juice Online, many involved in the project are “jumping through a lot of hoops” to get everything lined up for the building’s launch.

Updates have been provided to football donors and boosters, and as another AD staff member said on route to yet another meeting last week, “we’re off to build a (football indoor practice) building.”

As to the ’13 football schedule, online talk from both north and south circulated last week that Clemson was due in the Dome Sept. 14, week three of the season. But seriously, think about it. Would any team start off with games against Penn State at a neutral site, at Northwestern, then host a first-ever ACC game against as strong a program as Clemson in the season’s first three weeks?

With a new head coach to boot?

Scott Shafer would go charging into his boss’s office crying foul, and it’s not going to happen. Contracts are completed and all signs point to a FCS opponent in the Dome on Sept. 14, and the release of the entire ACC schedule is said to be imminent.

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Now in his fifth decade of covering SU sports, Brad was sports director of WSYR radio for eight years into the early 1990s, then wrote the Orange Watch column for The Big Orange/The Juice print publication for 18 years. A Syracuse University graduate, Brad currently runs his own media consulting business in the Philadelphia suburbs. Follow him on Twitter @BradBierman.